In conclusion
According to research, immigration sweeps at workplaces can hurt local economies because people stay home and cut back on their spending. They haven’t been known to give folks jobs thus far.
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One Friday morning in June, Carlos was startled out of a deep sleep by a barrage of desperate phone calls. Sometime about 10 a.m., he found his brother in chains at a clothing factory in downtown Los Angeles.
On June 6, dozens of people were arrested as agents from various federal agencies stormed the Ambiance Apparel plant and storefront. It was the first shot in the Trump administration’s protracted campaign in Southern California, where the greatest deportation effort in American history involves masked federal officials being filmed every day removing people from the street.
Jose, Carlos’ 35-year-old brother, was shackled at the ankles, waist, and wrists. Carlos saw Jose and thirteen other garment workers being brought into a white Sprinter vehicle that was waiting by immigration and customs enforcement officers wearing vests. Carlos confirmed that Jose is being held at an immigration detention facility in Adelanto, but he hasn’t seen his brother since.
Carlos, whom CalMatters is only referring to by his first name due to his personal fears of deportation, stated, “We had just lost our other brother, he died.” The loss of Jose felt like a second death to our family.
Despite a temporary reversal in mid-June, the Trump administration is still committed to its immigration campaign, which includes eye-catching elements like the raid at Ambiance. They’re taking place all throughout the state, from a restaurant in San Diego to farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley to Los Angeles’ Fashion District.
Although eliminating unlawful competition from the labor market is one of the declared goals of worksite raids, the reality is far more complicated: research has shown that immigration raids actually depress wages rather than increase them. Employers are less likely to use government immigration verification systems like E-Verify during the recruiting process, even after a raid.
However, Trump utilized the threat of illegal competition as the emotional and political cornerstone of his deportation proposals during the campaign.
On September 21, Trump told a crowd in Wilmington, North Carolina, “They’re taking your jobs, they’re taking your jobs.” Think about it: illegal aliens have taken every job created in this country in the past two years.
You will be saved by us. You will be saved by us. You will be saved by us.
In reality, no new position created between 2022 and 2024 was occupied by unauthorized immigrants. According to studies, deporting large numbers of workers from sectors of the economy that depend on illegal labor actually has minimal effect on American workers. According to Giovanni Peri, a UC Davis economist who has researched the effects of deportations on the economy under the Obama administration and in the 1930s, doing so actually decreases employment chances for people who were born in the United States.
This is partly due to the fact that many American workers—including those who do not work in industries with a high immigrant population—rely on the services provided by low-wage, illegal labor, whose costs would increase if mass deportations were to occur.
According to him, the local economy is weakened and there are fewer opportunities available for Americans as a result of the loss of some of these individuals and jobs that Americans are leaving.
According to Peri, there is little proof that companies that rely heavily on immigrants will increase pay in order to hire American workers in the event of widespread deportations.
He claimed that if such a world exists, it hasn’t existed in the United States for a while.
According to a research conducted by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas last year, raids typically result in more job turnover with negligible net changes in the employment rate.
According to the study’s authors, actions that target employers—such as audits, investigations, penalties, and criminal charges—have greater effects than those that target employees.
Families may suffer terrible, long-lasting effects.Even among children whose families were not directly affected, Latino students in a raided town in Tennessee had higher rates of absences, suspensions, expulsions, and substance addiction and self-harm. Following a large-scale 2008 raid, violent crime rose while property crime decreased in a small meatpacking town in northeast Iowa. Compared to the same population a year prior to the raid, infants born to Hispanic moms in that same Iowa town were at a 24% higher chance of having low birth weight.
According to Carlos, our mother is inconsolable and afraid for herself as well. Since many members of the same (Zapotec Indigenous) community in Mexico were abducted during the raid, it seems as though many families lost a loved one.
More than 1,800 people were arrested during Trump’s worksite raids during his first term, which primarily targeted manufacturing companies and facilities that processed beef and poultry in the Midwest and South. Although that is a very small portion of the 1.5 million persons who were deported under Trump between 2017 and 2021, it was crucial to the administration’s objective of instilling enough suspicion and anxiety in undocumented immigrants for them to self-deport.
However, Trump is concentrating on California this time.
There s no money after raid
Ambiance Apparel workers informed one another that immigration officials were probably going to visit their clothing factory. CalMatters was informed by unnamed employees that at least twice this year, most recently in April, individuals wearing Department of Homeland Security jackets were present on the job site. According to those employees, the company assured them that there would be no raid.
Through a lawyer, Ambiance Apparel denied any prior notice or connection to the raid, and the company refrained from providing any other comments.
Since a large portion of the labor is undocumented, the apparel business makes sense as a target for immigration enforcement. Agriculture is no exception. Undocumented immigrants make up between one-third and over half of California farmworkers, according to various estimates.
People haven’t developed the language to capture the impact of large-scale immigration raids on a community, according to William Lopez, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan and author of a book on the effects of immigration raids on mixed-status families. Lopez said he discovered this while interviewing witnesses to six immigration raids in the Midwest and South in 2018.
According to Lopez, following a raid, nobody drives, there is no money because everyone is paying bond, and nobody is attending school.
He went on to say that some people likened it to a public execution when there were hurricanes, tornadoes, and war. It was compared by others to the death of a grandchild.
During a 1986 overhaul of the country’s immigration system, Congress made it unlawful to intentionally hire individuals without authorization. Approximately 2.7 million undocumented immigrants were also made lawful by the legislation.
Still, false Social Security numbers have been fairly easy to obtain, and employers are largely able to duck liability with only a cursory review of the documents workers present when they re hired.
Employers have had little incentive to get stricter, even after the high-profile raids of meat and food processing plants during the second term of the George W. Bush administration. Demand for labor has remained high, fines for those caught have been lax and the use of contractors and subcontractors has proliferated, spreading out the risks of hiring..
The number of employers who have been fined or imprisoned under the statute is very low compared to the number of employees who have been rounded up as a result of these (workplace) raids, said Leticia Saucedo, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law. Employers were the intended objective of all of these, but workers were treated as collateral damage.
According to Saucedo, conflicts between two factions of the Republican Party are highlighted by workplace raids and worker deportations. While commercial interests want access to a stable, legal pool of foreign labor, nativist parties want to restrict immigration because they think it displaces American workers.
California farmer ready to demand a warrant
Farmers in California are particularly vulnerable to possible immigration raids. Just before Trump took office in January, the Border Patrol carried out a sweep in Kern County that served as a preview of its strategy under the new administration. Agents conducted immigration raids on farms in Ventura County in June. Industry associations urged the government to reevaluate these strategies.
In a statement, California Farm Bureau policy director Bryan Little stated, “We must act with compassion and common sense to ensure stability for our farm families and their communities.” Immigration enforcement should concentrate on removing criminals or bad actors rather than our important and vital farm workers.
In an interview, Little said he hasn t seen evidence of widespread enforcement at farms. But reports of any ICE sightings or arrests in agricultural areas have spread on social media, spreading fear among the workforce.
The way this is all being handled, it s interfering with food production, he said.
In Ventura County, federal agents ultimately arrested more than 30 immigrants in June, said Hazel Davalos, director of the local farmworker advocacy group CAUSE.
Lisa Tate manages three of her family s eight ranches in the county, where they grow citrus, avocados and coffee. Depending on the day, anywhere from five to 100 directly hired and contracted workers plant, trim or harvest on the land.
They were not among the farms visited by immigration agents, but Tate said she held a meeting with her workers to communicate a longstanding company policy: if agents ever show up, nobody s to be on our farm without proper authorization.
Tate said the raids have put employers like her in a tough position. She said she has never knowingly hired any undocumented workers. She said she reviews the employment documents her workers present, fills out the I-9 form and follows the rules.
Still, she called it a well-known secret that many in the industry don t have valid work permits.
She s tried to use the guest worker visa program before, but it comes with costly requirements to provide housing and transportation, and to guarantee the guest workers have enough paid hours for the months they re here. That was hard to budget for on a smaller farm like hers, she said, so she prefers hiring contracted workers locally as needed.
We need an immigration program that allows for longer-term workers, she said. Until we have a solution in place, we shouldn t take action because the whole system is built on what it is. And if you start picking it apart, there s all kinds of fallout.
Read More
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